This past Friday night Steve and I had the pleasure of traveling to Wilton, CT to hear Steve's sister Annbeth and niece Megan sing in The Wilton Singers, a community choral society. One of the songs, entitled The Work Of Christmas, was very moving and has been permanently planted in my mind because of both the tune and the lyrics.
Click here to listen to the song:
When the song of the angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flock,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among brothers,
To make music from the heart.
But what to do between now and this future time? There is good work to be done in the form of finding, healing, feeding, releasing, rebuilding, bringing, and singing together. While all of this comes from God, He has decided to work through people like us as He makes His kingdom visible to a watching world. What a privilege it is for reclaimed sinners to be part of the work of Christmas!
I read this on face book and just had to print it out so I could hang it up here by my computer at work as a reminder that pain is part of the process of Kingdom work here on this earth. I hope it blesses others. Debbi
ReplyDelete"The suffering of Mary, the mother of Jesus.
I often think about what it must have been like to be Mary. What would it be like to hold the Savior in your arms? What would it feel like to look into the eyes of the child who would ultimately rescue the world from death? What did his little voice sound like? Did he like to be rocked to sleep? Oh, to have held that baby!
The older I get, the more I realize that Mary’s calling to be the mother of Jesus was a calling to a life of suffering.
When the angel showed up in her home her life, the one she had planned, was turned upside down.
She had to tell Joseph she was pregnant, he assumed she had been unfaithful. Pain.
She was an unwed pregnant woman which bore great shame. Pain.
She carried and delivered a son whose life was threatened from birth. Pain.
She listened as people taunted and mocked her son. Pain.
She watched as soldiers tortured and beat him until he was unrecognizable. Pain.
She stood at the foot of the cross and stared up at the broken, lifeless body of her son. Pain.
Her son became her Savior in the same way that he became ours, but the pain she felt was different. It was the suffering of a mother.
So often we fall into the lie that Jesus wants us to be happy. We get caught up in the idea that if he truly loved us we wouldn’t go through difficult stuff. We begin to believe that if Jesus was really interested, he would spare us the pain.
If we look at what his own mother suffered we would see that it’s NOT in his love that he SPARES us from pain. It’s IN his love that he PURSUES us through our pain.
Our goal should not be happiness, it should be holiness. And when we seek to let the pains of this world draw us closer to the cross, we begin to look a little more like Jesus. And we lay down our goal of happiness and from the foot of the cross we find joy.
Joy even in the midst of suffering so that we, like Mary, would be found faithful."